Wes Craven: genius or ‘revolting?’

If you can believe film historian David Thomson, filmmaker Wes Craven deserves no respect. Whether it’s A Nightmare on Elm Street or the Scream franchise, Craven stands condemned of betraying his undeniable intelligence to foist loathsome drivel on film audiences. At least, that’s the word from Thomson, a non-fan who can’t resist piling on the pejoratives: Craven’s output is “cruel … hideous … odious … blunt … cynical … revolting.”

It’s safe to predict that Thomson, a highly influential critic, won’t be in the cheering section when Scream 4 arrives in cinemas on April 15. It also seems possible that this latest contribution to the franchise — the first since 2000 — will rekindle the debate about film violence.

What makes the Scream controversy so intriguing is Craven himself. He’s always been determined to set his own context — and it’s a surprisingly intellectual one — for the debate. It’s a further reason why enemies like Thomson get so incensed: It’s not just the slashing violence of the films, it’s the fact that they’re deemed worthy of scholarly academic dissertations in learned journals, and that Craven, a former philosophy teacher, unabashedly invokes classical Greek drama in defence of them.

But is Craven equally supportive of Scream 4? That question has caused a flurry on the Internet, given the fact that the new film had something of a stormy shoot, thanks to clashes between Dimension Films’ Bob Weinstein and veteran screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who did the scripts for the first two Scream movies. Williamson exited the project early — and nobody really believes it was because of another commitment to the cable series, The Vampire Diaries. He was replaced by Ehren Kruger, who wrote the script for Scream 3.

In an interview last week with Entertainment Weekly, Williamson confirmed he had “a massive fight” with Weinstein over what direction the storyline should take — “but at the same time, the fight ended and we hugged it out and we continued forward and we tried to make the best movie possible.”

But, Williamson adds, the dispute “was also very raw and sensitive.”

Last month, Craven told his Twitter following that Scream 4 didn’t feel like “his” film, and followed this up with an interview with the website Total Film, in which he said that “in some ways, it’s a Wes Craven film, and in some ways it’s not … because it’s not a script I have control of. It’s ultimately controlled by what the studio wants. … I signed up to a script by Kevin and, unfortunately, that didn’t go all the way through the shooting.”

In response to his critics, Craven will insist that Scream is merely a continuation of a violent but honourable cultural tradition that has always been ready to explore the various levels of fear.

“The most unalterable one is that we’re completely contained in these bodies. These bodies are very frail. If you go one story off the ground and your body goes off the ledge, it’s going to be severely damaged.

“The merest little sharp instrument can cause severe mortal damage to this body. The edged weapon — the knife — is the perfect primal example of the threat to the body, and that, in itself, is an ancient device throughout nature. You look at the talons and claws and teeth in nature and how they find a basic entry port into the body in order to rip it apart and make it their own. That’s one of our primal fears: the breaching of the wall of the body itself.”